The purpose of the study was first to create a training program suitable for 4–6-year-old children in daycare centers, which would support their reading ability and reading awareness, and afterwards evaluate the results. Furthermore, the study illustrates the children’s, their parents’ and the kindergarten teachers’ views of reading and the applicability of reading games to the pedagogics of day-care centers. The reading games have been built on the context of emergent literacy. The socioconstructivist and sociocultural viewpoint was chosen as the theoretical basis of learning. The study was carried out in two interventions in the years 1993–1994 and 1999–2000. The first intervention included 14 daycare centers (n = 285 children) and the second included 7 daycare centers (n = 182 children). Information was collected about the reading ability and reading awareness (reading subs-kills and context and cultural awareness). The children were tested and interviewed three times during the year. The parents and the kindergarten teachers were sent questionnaires on the children’s reading. The kindergarten teachers were also interviewed. In both the children’s, the kindergarten teachers’ and the parents’ opinion the reading games were a successful training program. The change in the reading ability and sub-skills was statistically highly significant in both of the interventions. The development was of equal volume in both of the interventions. The differences between children of different age groups were statistically significant, whereas the difference between the sexes was not statistically significant. The children were willing to learn to read in a daycare center and they considered reading a way of learning and knowing. Both the parents and the kindergarten teachers thought that the reading games are well suited to daycare center pedagogics, on condition that the play orientation was stressed. The parents underlined the importance of co-operation between daycare center, school and home. The kindergarten teachers thought that the reading games have gradually been absorbed into the peda-gogics of daycare centers and that they have diversified pre-school instruction.

en

dc.format.extent

179 s.

dc.language.iso

fin

dc.publisher

Jyväskylän yliopisto

dc.relation.ispartofseries

Jyväskylä studies in education, psychology and social research;0075-4625;270